Kathleen Hanna on Smells Like Teen Spirit

a coupla days ago at Joe's Pub:

Desiderata

Lizzy Mercier Descloux died on April 20, 2004 from cancer at the age of 47. She was a French singer and musician (and sometime writer and painter). I really didn't know much about her until a few months ago I ran into this:



The song ("Room Mate") is from her 1981 album Mambo Nassau. Amazing stuff. Some kind of weird mutant no-wave disco post-punk Afro music hybrid.

I look at her picture and I'm not sure what to think. I love these old black-and-white pictures from the first punk generation in New York in the mid-1970s. They're so rich with expectation. Mercier Descloux first visited New York in 1975 and became close friends with Richard Hell and Patti Smith, both of whom contributed to her first book Desiderata. A biography reads:

Self-taught as a guitarist, Mercier Descloux revealed herself as a supreme minimalist within the no wave genre, concentrating on spindly, single-note lines combined with wrong-note harmonies and funky rhythms. Mercier Descloux's singing voice, while limited in terms of carrying a tune, was devoted to rhythmic chattering, humming, and chanting lyrics that serve to cheer the music on and to build a quirky sense of excitement.

I actually read about her long before I'd ever heard of her. A long long time ago, I read Richard Hell's novel Go Now (1997). It's a really brilliant book--beautifully written--which I'm sure lots of people read when it came out and then promptly forgot. William Gibson (he of Neuromancer and cyberpunk fame) called it "vile, scabrous, unforgivable, and deserving of the widest possible audience." The main character is a dude named Mud, clearly modeled on Hell himself. A review noted, "Capable of moments of profound personal insight and revelation as well as acts of profane indecency and sexual deviance, Hell's character both seduces and repels."

Hell himself, of course, had been ground through the New York punk scene in the 1970s, forming the incredible Television with Tom Verlaine, and single-handedly creating the punk aesthetic of ripped shirts and safety pins that would be appropriated by the Sex Pistols. After Verlaine fired him from Television, Hell formed Richard Hell & The Voidoids, recording one of the best songs of the class of 1977 ("Blank Generation"), before succumbing to an eon of heroin addiction. Believe it or not, he was was a brilliant prose writer, much better than he was a musician.

Anyway, what does this all have to do with Lizzy Mercier Decloux? When she died, Hell published a statement on his website:

Lizzy Mercier Descloux has died. She was diagnosed with cancer a year ago. I met her in 1975 when she came to New York from Paris at the age of eighteen to investigate what musicians were doing on the Bowery (she would eventually make some albums herself). She was the primary model for the "love interest" Chrissa in my novel Go Now. These lines from that book are based on those first weeks I knew her:

In the course of the three weeks she first spent here she'd moved me and removed me and then moved into me, leaving me gasping--I can still feel it in my stomach when I think about it--like I was the invaded victim in a space-parasite movie, as if my heart and lungs were furniture she might be throwing out but would certainly rearrange at whim. She seemed to come from another dimension.

She was little, with matted hair. She had--she has--a strong jaw and these big marshy lips. Eyes like drains, like reality drains, like in Psycho where Janet Leigh's blood whirlpools away down the tub along with everything else in the movie. Her nose is flat, her whole face is flat. A slim body, nearly hipless [...]

She was a spectacle: carnivore and prey in one, like a walking wildlife film, with that riveting amoral charisma of nature. A complete mystery. At 17 she was more sophisticated than anyone I'd ever known, while also seeming utterly unaffected. Or at least her affectations came from such a stubborn confidence and will to defy convention that they were irresistible [...]

Having read what Hell had to say, I went back, listened to her album again. Looked at the picture above and tried to discern some secret of life. A life. A death. And all that came inbetween.















Richard & Lizzy, sometime in the mid-1970s

You're Still Fucking Peasants As Far As I Can See

John Ono Lennon (1940-1980).
There was nothing like him before.
Nothing like him since.

Lennon playing the best guitar of his life, in 1970:



Lennon playing the best rock'n'roll of his life, in 1969:



Lennon playing the best song of his life, in 1970:

New PJ Harvey

From her forthcoming album Let England Shake, this is the first single (courtesy of Punkreas):

PJ Harvey - Written on the Forehead [mp3]

Joy of Speed EP

Joy -- Invisible
Joy -- The Big Tear
Joy -- 1989 Or So
Joy -- Anodyne
Joy -- The Reluctant Astronaut
Joy -- Wake Up [version 2]

She Had To Leave .... Los Angeles

I am in a hotel in Los Angeles watching a particularly good episode of Boardwalk Empire. I often wish that I lived in places that I visit. I felt this way as the plane flew over the city and landed at LAX. The downtown is generic, sterile, but the sprawl of the rest of the city seems strangely alluring. These thousands of houses spread out across miles and miles, suburbs, neighborhoods with strange Spanish names, the kind of places you would never see in New York.

New York is the stuff of the modern, the cutting edge, the frenetic artery of popular culture. Los Angeles is just ... the place where you always imagine life will be better and worse at the same time. I want to run away to LA so that one day I can complain about it. Wanting to move to LA makes me feel slightly young again. At least I want something. The thing is: LA exists as myth in my mind because it can still be the place I run away to and start a new life. It's a blank slate in a megacity on the ocean. Anything could happen. I could move here. Buy a car. Roll down the window. Drive by chain restaurants that serve Mexican food. Listen to KROQ. Drive up the mountains to Laurel Canyon. Maybe I can find where Joni Mitchell lived when she wrote The Hissing of Summer Lawns. Or where Neil Young (channeling Charles Manson) wrote:

"Well, I hear that Laurel Canyon / is full of famous stars
But I hate them worse than lepers / and I'll kill them in their cars."

Being here makes me want to watch Thom Anderson's legendary and disappeared-from-existence documentary Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003).



LA was also the place of Jane's Addiction, Tool, Guns'n'Roses, the Germs, the Doors, and X.

And oh yeah, one more thing: Fuck San Francisco.

In honor of L.A., two songs, both excellent air guitar anthems:

"Los Angeles" by X

and

"L.A. Woman" by the Doors.

Been Listening

The original video, worth watching, here.

Parks Whose Names I Have Forgotten

It was spring. I had a haircut. It rained sometimes. It was hopeful. The soundtrack of my brief time with J was mostly Tim, its dulled drumbeats making my little bedroom on the top floor of the apartment much bigger than it really was. Both our bedrooms, C’s and mine, were on the top floor connected by a bathroom. Once a naked woman wandered into my room, disorientedly looking for him. She giggled at me and left, continuing her search.

In the spring, new joy, new life. I told J that “The Sweetest Thing” was her song. She and I spent a lot of days and nights wandering parks in the city, parks whose names I have now forgotten. There was one with a big concrete cupola dome; you had to stand about a hundred foot away from the dome, run up to it to generate inertia, in order to climb to the top where we would often sit late into the night, looking at the deepest darkest blue of the night sky. We took a lot of pictures, her smile captured like an icecream in the sun. We thought it would be nice to rent a child for a day. A kid for a day would be fun but more than a day might interfere with our own growing up. She worked at a new Indian restaurant as a waitress (in the sky) but I think she never liked it and quit very soon. We had little adventures. Like rock climbers, we climbed up the dizzying side of my apartment--several floors up against a sheer wall--when we got locked out. She would call me, come over, do weird math problems on my bed, and fall asleep, her full lips as dry as leaves. When we parted the next morning, I would sit there and listen to Tim for the three hundredth time wondering if there was a way to “hold my life, ‘cause I just might lose it.” She had an impassive regal nature at times, her face, her posture, her sunglasses, and I would call her my Joan of Arc.

With J, I also discovered the multitudes of meanings within mix tapes, mostly in the making of them, but also in the giving of them, a topic given much critical attention by the dude who later wrote Hi Fidelity. I spent hours laboring over every beginning, every end of a side, just to make J listen to Firehose’s "In Memory of Elizabeth Cotton” or the Housemartins’ “Johannesburg,” two utterly beautiful songs that I earnestly believed would show, nay, shockingly prove that what was all around us on the radio, on TV, in books, in civic life all over the world, was shallow, cheap, and soulless since in this little secret world of music, there was so much beauty and depth that I desperately wanted to share.

Like much of what gives adolescence (or delayed adolescence) its charge or inspiration, that “beauty” had value only in opposition to what I considered “ugly.” We did not live in a bubble. Stuff from the outside was always present, at least as background radiation. At that time, the cultural ambiance included hair metal which seemed so awful then that so many years later, I still find little joy in the ironic celebration of Motley Crue, Poison, Bon Jovi, Twisted Sister, Dio, Whitesnake, and many many other bands on VH1. They were terrible then, and some things remain just as terrible even if you add the knowing wink of awareness. There’s nothing wrong with destroying the idiotic demarcations between high and low culture, but it’s another thing to worship the equation that says: Terrible Music + Ten Years Later = Cool Ironic T-shirt.

What is “good” music? What is “terrible” music? It is taste after all. What makes sense in someone’s world view is all that matters. To some people, music is stuff you were interested in as a young person but retain only a vague interest as an adult. For those people, the difference between good and bad music—or indeed the definitions of each—are based on a set of assumptions that would frustrate those who invest their emotions, their fucking lives and careers in the production or consumption of music.

What is good and what is bad music is an intensely personal thing on the one hand. Yet, it is also an intensely shared decision, since we are mostly driven to consume certain types of music not because they have some intrinsic value of goodness or badness but because others have let it be known that that music is worth consuming. Writers for entertainment magazines and newspapers and blogs, journalists on TV, posters at record stores—in other words, advertising—forces a consensus of consumption.

The goal is to create the largest consensus possible, so that millions of people will buy an album like Nevermind in 1991-92. But there are smaller consensuses too: for people of all different tastes, niches, and demographics. These consensuses typically have a brief window, through which acts or genres pass through, after which they are replaced by other acts or genres.

Does that mean that there is no absolute good or bad music? That we are led around like sheep by decisions other people make about what is good or bad? I hope not. I like to think that the music I like is the music I like because it is so good, because it moves me. But I can’t escape the feeling that much of the music I like(d), I discovered because it represented certain things, pre-packaged for a pre-packaged lifestyle, an ideology for disenfranchised youth seeking to avoid being part of the big (or biggest) consensus. This was especially true in college: my goal was to be part of a Small Consensus, but a consensus nevertheless. It’s no fun to like music if no one in the world has ever heard it (let alone heard of it). But there is a fine line and it is easy to get caught up in received knowledge. For us back then it was easy to owe our tastes to an already established canon. By the time I was in college, many people, including such joyless arbiters of good taste as Rolling Stone or Spin magazine, had created Rock History [tm], eras of self-conscious myth-building told in important looking history books on rock music that communicated gravitas. These magazines and books were supposed to tell us what was good and what was bad. I hated those books and magazines but read them all the time.

J was really the first American born desi I’d ever hung out with at any length (beyond my cousins back in Illinois). It was hard to be prejudiced once you’d met her—she was so amazingly disarming with her pictures of Rekha, tapes of Hindi film songs, and interest in the culture of the Indian subcontinent. She also had a big social network of Americans of desi origin, kids who I saw occasionally at parties and things but who I also generally avoided. But if I felt uncomfortable in these contiguous demographics, I also felt that the divisions between Indians, Pakistanis, and Bangladeshis were whitewashed here out in the wilderness away from “home.” Our brownness trumped any nationalistic impulses and rarely, if ever, was political or religious identity an issue. The many desi friends I had were Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Pakistanis, Indians, Bangladeshis, and Americans, and it seems so striking in the post-2001 world to think that none of us gave it the slightest thought. Race was more important than your passport. Being a mutt of sorts, neither a “true” desi, nor one of the American variety, I felt an acute sense of non-belonging to each subculture. I never liked Hindi films, I barely understood a word of the language, and as I drifted away from the idea of home, I became severely dislocated from a grounding in any culture except perhaps my adopted one of Western pop music, a language that seemed to me as universal as Esperanto. So…whither the subcontinent (or “South Asia” as it became more common in the ‘90s) in my imagination?

The subcontinent was alive in my imagination only through the eyes of desis I knew, principally J, who had grown up in a small town on the Texas border with Mexico and whose identity seemed so perfectly formed across the various intersections of her background even though she was so precociously young.

J was a big fan of Madonna ("I'm so excited 'cause you're my best friend...") and top 40 pop music in general but we found common ground—our private and brief musical consensus—in the odd and coincidental strands that intertwined for us in that spring, somewhere between Madonna and the Waterboys, music about possibilities. Rock’n’roll—at least the best rock’n’roll—is about being young, and the music that I associate with that time is very young: the voice of Michael Stipe on “Gardening at Night” or the cathartic noise of Husker Du's Warehouse: Songs and Stories. It was the first time I discovered that music that reminded you of something could be much more powerful than music that actually was, if that makes any sense.

Now, hundreds of years later, I no longer remember how or what I felt about J but I can redraw the skeleton of those times so clearly in the distant murmur of early R.E.M. or Morrissey’s first solo single which came out in the spring sometime. “Suedehead” was a wonderful and insidious spoonful of pop music bathed in pathos, bathos, and the ringing chimes of guitars and pianos transmitted directly from some heavenly recording studio. When J once tried to sneak a peak at my personal diaries, the song coincidentally mirrored reality: “You had to sneak into my room just to read my diary / It was just to see, just to see, all the things you knew I’d written about you . . .”

It was Morrissey’s first single, but also his best ever, rivaling everything that the Smiths ever put out. We had expected Johnny Marr to come out four cylinders firing from the Smiths, but he weirdly disappeared for what seemed like decades. Children by the millions who had waited for Johnny were instead treated to a spate of brilliant singles from Morrissey. So began my search for every Morrissey 12”, each one hidden with myriads of strange tracks never to be found on albums. My favorite b-side of the period: “Sister I’m a Poet,” another Stephen Street gem which was the soundtrack to many of my treks from the apartment to class on gray fall mornings.

The album itself, Viva Hate (how, at age 22, that title seemed to be so appropriate…), was fantastic, filled with peculiar songs about marginal characters, once on the cusp of greatness/love/sex/acceptance, now tossed to the detritus of adulthood.

If I wince now in embarrassment when I hear most of Morrissey’s self-absorbed ruminations (“Late Night on Maudlin Street” anyone?—a seemingly endless navel gazing endurance test), other songs, principally “Every Day is Like Sunday” (Morrissey’s second 45) was a superb meditation on 1970s England, the only one I remembered from having grown up there: the cheap trinkets at Blackpool, the Carry On movies,the comic actor Norman Wisdom, our hero of the downtrodden and ostracized.

In one rare moment of resignation, J voiced what we all denied:

we were all “ordinary boys” (and girls). And like all ordinary relationships, our very brief one did not last through the spring, interrupted by my attraction to the past when I should have been looking at the future. Later, in May, J snuck into my second floor apartment while I was sleeping and left a black earring on my dresser with a goodbye note that was so sad to read (true love, she said) but entirely unsurprising.

Very much enamored of her for a while, I wore the earring for many years but eventually, of course, lost it. (Picture of me above, wearing said earring, fall '88).

[Note: The above is an excerpt from Chapter 9 of my someday-to-be-published "rock'n'roll book."]

[Additional recent note: recently, I looked up Google Earth and located that awesome dome in the middle of that park in Texas. It looks eerie in a satellite photograph. And yeah, I rediscovered the name of the park too.]

Hardly Getting Over It

I found Husker Du in the spring of 1988 when I bought Warehouse: Songs and Stories, a double album. Their music was very male, aggressive but yet vulnerable. It always felt like winter when you listened to Husker Du. When you listened to them, brittle cold became catharsis. A couple of years later I stumbled upon Candy Apple Grey. For some reason, it's not exactly a fan favorite but it completely blew me away. The production is awful but, boy, that Grant Hart, sure knew how to write a good song. Here's a beautiful song from that album, written by Bob Mould. Not much to say about it:

new music 2010

Some new music that I've been listening to recently. I thought I'd do some capsule reviews:

• Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross -- The Social Network (2010): This a surprisingly top notch soundtrack to the movie of the same name, directed by David Fincher. I tend to think original movie scores are usually forgettable but this one is remarkably good, often even beautiful. It's a bit like Nine Inch Nail's album Ghosts I-IV (2008), and in fact, a couple of the tracks on the movie soundtrack are reworked tracks from Ghosts I-IV. Atticus Ross is some English dude who helped Reznor produce and/or program NIN albums With Teeth and Ghosts I-IV. As far as the music on the soundtrack, it veers between ambient soundscapes to techno pulsing beats. I highly recommend it. You can download the soundtrack here.

• Deerhunter -- Halcyon Digest (2010): I've been a big fan of Deerhunter since I first heard Microcastle (2008), one of my favorite albums of the past decade. The main guy behind the band is Bradford Cox, an unbelievably prolific and talented musician and songwriter who draws from a vast array of indie rock influences to produce pop music that's heavenly, nostalgic, and melodic. Each of Deerhunter's songs are packed, totally packed, with good ideas, from the sound of strange instruments to the shimmering production. Cox notes that, "The album's title is a reference to a collection of fond memories and even invented ones... The way that we write and rewrite and edit our memories to be a digest version of what we want to remember, and how that's kind of sad." The music is much better than that quote makes it sound. This is the best pop music around today, 11 magnificent songs guaranteed to put you in a dream state. The key song here is the first one, "Earthquake."

• How To Destroy Angels -- How To Destroy Angels EP (2010): Another Reznor creation, this one a six-track e.p. that was released as a free download and is much better than one might have expected. It's a collaboration with Reznor's wife Mariqueen Maandig and the aforementioned Atticus Ross. Since when have you ever heard a collaboration between a famous musician and their spouse be any good (Ram? Sometime in New York City?). Some of this stuff reminds of late period Nine Inch Nails but the female voice gives it a unique quality, a little bit like crossing Massive Attack with The Fragile, if that makes any sense at all.

• LCD Soundsystem -- This Is Happening (2010): On the one hand, this is more of the same, but on the other, it isn't. This album, supposedly the final one to be released by James Murphy under this name is, in terms of sound, actually a mix of the first two albums. Which means that there's nothing on this album that will surprise and if you liked the first two, you'll like this one. The standout track here is "All I Want," which rips off David Bowie's " 'Heroes'," but manages to somehow sound new at the same time. And as awesome.

• M.I.A. - Maya (2010): So word on the street has been that this is one mixed-up album that's unlistenable. Well, it's not a pretty album and it's very aggressive. For all of M.I.A.'s mixed up politics, terrible videos, and Madonna-esque obsession with fashion-as-substance, she did take a big chance with this album. I can see why no one on planet Earth liked it. So I'll take the unpopular stance that it's actually quite an interesting album. I'm not sure I like it, but it is a ballsy move on her part. It's like when VU followed up the first album with White Light/White Heat. It was kind of a big fuck you. I'm not sure if that's what M.I.A. intended but it's clear that since everybody hates M.I.A. these days, she has achieved something, in spite or perhaps because of herself.

• Mogwai -- Special Movies (2010): I didn't expect that much from a live Mogwai album, but wow, this really blew me away. It is recorded in pristine fashion so the sound is just supremely fantastic. But it's more than that: the song selection is perfect, the pacing is impeccable, and the music is awesome. Mogwai go from the prettiest most delicate music to blow-out-your-eardrums jet engine sounds in the space of seconds but they do it with grace. If you buy the CD (which has 11 tracks), you also get six extra tracks from the same shows, including a superb version of "New Paths to Helicon Part 1." And you can also get a DVD with a movie documentary entitled Burning that depicts the shows directed by some famous dude. And finally, one more thing: I was at one of the shows in Brooklyn (at the Music Hall of Williamsburg) where both the audio and video were recorded, so I have some extra attachment to this.

• Nest -- Retold (2010): I don't know much about the band Nest but I understand that they are apparently two pianists, Otto Totland and Huw Roberts, from Norway. This is a beautiful instrumental album of modern classical music. Besides piano, the musicians use the Welsh harp, violins, woodwind instruments, field recordings, and some percussion. They claim that their goal is "to produce beautiful music free of pretense" and in that, they are 100% successful. I've rarely heard music this beautiful made by pianos. It is an excellent contribution to the canon of ambient contemporary classical composition. A soundtrack for a movie never made.

• School of Seven Bells -- Disconnect From Desire (2010): This, the second, album from these people, betters the first one by expanding into more electronic music. It's still a mixture of shoegazer aspirations, Nico-esque chanteuse affectations, and pop music for beautiful people, but now they get the sequencers and drum machines out. I have to admit, I like it a lot. The two women in the band, the identical twins Alejandra and Claudia Deheza, who are oddly gorgeous, produce together a kind of drone-y sound best for zoning out. The main guitarist and instrumentalist in the band is Benjamin Garza, formerly of Secret Machines. (This band sounds NOTHING like Secret Machines.) At times, they can seem New Age-y, but overall, it's a good step away from being pigeonholed as worshipers at the shrine of My Bloody Valentine.

• Seefeel -- Faults EP (2010): After 14 years, Seefeel released their first recorded output last month. In my estimation, Seefeel were one of the greatest electronic bands of the 1990s and their breakup was tragic (although probably a good idea). Anyway, the main guy, Mark Clifford reunited with Sarah Peacock, and a couple of new members (from Japan!) and put out this four-track EP. The question is what kind of ground-breaking electronic music could one possibly release in 2010? Well, they sidestepped that whole question by making Faults, which is ... well, really, there's not much like this stuff out there. Seefeel's great achievement was always to make the totally eerie and weird sound totally natural. And they still do it. I hope an album is on the way.

• Swans -- My Father Will Guide Me Up A Rope To The Sky (2010): For some reason, Michael Gira (now 56!) decided to restart Swans. He not only recorded an album but is touring with the band, which includes a few old members and a few new ones, but no Jarboe. Now, you either like Swans or you don't. So trying to write a review of a Swans album is a lost cause if they are not your cup of tea. They are mine. I think they are one of the greatest bands of the post-punk era. So what did they come up with this time? Well, a pretty fucking great piece of music. Yes, let me just get it out of the way and say that it's relentlessly grim and bone-crushingly despondent. But then again, what did you expect? One reviewer of the album writes: "The real bravery is for an album whose title equates religion with suicide to end almost at the other end of the spectrum: 'Teach me please, to cease to resist,' Gira asks. 'May I find my way to the reason to come home / May I find my way to the foot of your throne'." Uh-huh, yeah. This is one of the best albums of the year. Oh, one more thing: one of the titles of the songs: "You Fucking People Make Me Sick."

• Wild Nothing -- Gemini (2010): This is about as far away from Swans as you can get. Wild Nothing are a bunch of very young kids from somewhere in Virginia or something. They make good 1980s music, the kind of music that I actually grew up with, but for these kids is just fake nostalgia. You remember how you listened to "Ask" by the Smiths when you were in high school? You remember how you listened to the Sundays singing "Here's Where the Story Ends"? You remember how you checked out The Ocean Blue do "Between Something and Nothing"? It's sort of like that but in 2010. It's an album about being young and having nothing to remember. So yeah, it's a good feeling. I just can't get over how derivative yet unbelievably awesome the song "Summer Holiday" is.